Category John Adlum
What Remains of the Nineteenth Century
Not much remains of the earlier pastoral landscape. Located most likely where Lutyens’s complex, along with Eric Bedford’s New Chancery (1955-1962), now dominates, all traces of Normanstone’s buildings are gone, surviving only in photographs, maps and the family records. However there are echoes of Normanstone’s sloping terrain, streams, farm roads, orchards and that gardening was […]
Wine and Computers: The Surprising Washington Origins of Two Industries
Normanstone’s near neighbor came to be the seventy-six acres of Northview, purchased by Cornelius and Margaret Barber in 1834, located where the Naval Observatory complex now spreads. Margaret was the daughter of Revolutionary War veteran, land surveyor and horticulturist John Adlum, the author of the first book on indigenous American viticulture (1823). Adlum’s own estate, […]
Landscape of a Washington Place 
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